


the kind of thing she ought to know

by maremote



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Dean Winchester in Denial, Dean has to protect Sammy, Demons, Fluff, Gen, Ghosts, Guilty Dean Winchester, Protective Dean Winchester, Salt And Burns, Suicidal Dean Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-08
Updated: 2018-10-08
Packaged: 2019-07-24 01:01:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16170383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maremote/pseuds/maremote
Summary: Sam and Dean went back to the graveyard to find a kid sitting at the edge of graveyard with a cat in her lap."I had to burn her," she explained. "I don't expect you to understand. But if you arrest me, don't expect me to stay locked up for long.""We're not going to arrest you," said Sam, and that seemed to be enough for the girl, because she smiled. "You're hunters, aren't you?"ORHow Dean definitely did NOT adopt a fourteen-year-old hunter named Claudia.





	the kind of thing she ought to know

**Author's Note:**

> So this happened. 
> 
> also someone please tell me how betas work I think I need one
> 
>  
> 
> Title from a Billy Joel song

Dean and Sam met Claudia about two years back.

It was a standard salt and burn until it wasn't- and there was no way Dean was going to get to Sam in time- and _oh no oh no not again_ \- and Dean was _this close_  to losing everythingeverythingeverything-

-and then tendrils of flame erupted around the ghost, and Dean was pulled back from the edge of nothingness so quickly he almost got whiplash. Sam whirled around, wide-eyed, and then met Dean's eyes. Silently, they asked each other a question neither could answer.

Sam and Dean went back to the graveyard to find a kid sitting at the edge of graveyard with a cat in her lap. The grave was full of smoke and fire, slowly ebbing out, and the girl looked up as they approached.

"I had to burn her," she explained. "I don't expect you to understand. But if you arrest me, don't expect me to stay locked up for long."

"We're not going to arrest you," said Sam, because Dean's words were floating somewhere above his head, and his arms were too heavy for him to reach up and pull them down.

Not that he'd tell Sammy.

That seemed to be enough for the girl, and she smiled. "You're hunters, aren't you?"

 

The girl was fourteen, and she had a name. *Claudia Shahzadeh*. "Well, no," she corrected herself. "Not really. On paper, I'm Claudia Dashner. My dad was white. But he-," her expression darkened. "Anyways, it's Shahzadeh."

Claudia Shahzadeh takes an immediate liking to Dean, which is slightly concerning to him, because Claudia's cheerful and pretty damn brilliant and he knows he's going to fuck this up.

She likes Sam too, but it's Dean she really seems to like, and to his dismay, she starts to really grow on him. She's sort of adorably cheerful, and pretty useful on hunts. She starts tagging along with them; she's got this bike that she added an electrical engine too and nailed a milk crate onto the back of, and she rides it straight though a ghost once to distract it and almost gives Dean a heart attack. "Distractions are my JAM," she grins afterwards.

He makes sure she knows he was upset because she didn't follow the plan, not because she could've gotten herself killed.

Claudia gives him a little indulgent grin afterwards, and he knows right away he hasn't fooled her.

It hurts him how much he cares at this point, and how something in him twists painfully when he realizes she was doing it to save him.

Once they're on a hunt and this damn demon gets his hands on the both of them; and says something about needing blood from a pure soul. Well, Dean's heart just about stops at that; and he isn't surprised when the demon takes one look at him and proclaims his Hell-tarnished, Purgatory-scuffed soul damaged beyond repair.

It's all he can do not to ask the demon to do him a favor and kill him anyway. Because Dean _will not_  kill himself and leave Sammy alone; Sam's already been through too much crap because of Dean. But if he dies, well, what he can do, right?

But instead he shouts and yells obscenities at the demon while he slices open Claudia's arm, and Dean can barely breathe while he shoves in a tube because _there is no way that doesn't hurt_ \- it reminds him of Alastair and what he did to Dean in Hell and there's an image, _Claudia in Hell_  and Dean shouts, "Listen to me, you son of a bitch, I swear to _God_  I will kill you!"

But that's all he can do. Yell.

The demon hooks Claudia up to a couple empty 1L pop bottles and sits there.

He just sits there, and lets her bleed.

Claudia's a tough kid, which makes it worse for Dean. She sasses off the demon at first in a way that reminds Dean of himself; she just _refuses_  to shut up.

But time passes, and Dean knows Sam's on the way, but why can't he _hurry the hell up?_

By the time Sam does get there for a rescue, almost two liters of Claudia's blood are gone, and Dean's almost out of his mind. She's listless and gray, slouched in her chair. When Dean yanks out the plastic tube, she winces just a little, then tenses and mumbles, "Please don't take any more."

Dean's voice cracks a little as he promises he won't.

As soon as she hears him speak, though, she relaxes and gets this _little relieved smile_  and slumps into him with all of her weight. "Blood loss is my JAM," she mumbles incoherently, and Dean wraps his arms around her and kisses the top of her head, and thinks to himself, _well, fuck._

_his is not going to end well._

But he doesn't kick her out, because she's way too deep in this now. The monsters know; Claudia is connected to Dean and Sam Winchester, and there is no fucking way Dean is going to leave his fifteen-year-old to fend for herself against the biggest and baddest.

 _A_  fifteen-year-old. _A._   Not his. Fuck.

Claudia meets Jody a little while after her fifteenth birthday; she only tells Dean about her birthday two days afterwards. Dean asks her why.

She falls silent. "Birthdays don't have the best memories for me."

Dean doesn't press the subject.

She doesn't tell Sam about her birthday, only Dean. Dean tries not to dwell on that.

Dean knows enough about her to have been able to talk Sam down about Claudia going to school, and he's fully prepared to talk Jody down when she gets started.

They all go down to Sioux Falls to see Jody, and Claudia's almost vibrating with excitement to see this Sheriff Mills person, and it is _definitely not cute._

Man, he's screwed.

But the subject comes up.

Claudia's in the kitchen getting a glass of water, so Jody tactfully implies something about Claudia needing an education, so Dean yells for Claudia to come back.

"How come you're spending so much time on your laptop these days?" asks Dean, though he knows the answer. Claudia's eyes light up, and she wraps her legs around the chair legs, shuffling closer to the table. She always does this; gets really _into_  whatever she's explaining- and _boy_  does Claudia love explaining things.

She'd make a great teacher.

"So I found this website," she says, "and it offers free online courses, which are _totally_  my jam. I finished Spanish last month, and now I'm doing Dutch, Italian, and AP calculus, grade 12."

"How's that going?" Dean asks, and promptly has to disguise his smile by curving his lips around a beer bottle. Jody is busy staring at Claudia and doesn't notice.

Claudia notices. Her mouth curves up a tiny bit at the edges, not the way it does when she's trying not to laugh, which is similar but just a little different, but the way it does when she's caught on to a joke you're playing and wants to help. "Well," she says, "they've got this fluency test, and I only actually started three weeks ago, so technically you're not supposed to take it- but you know rebellion is my JAM so I did anyway- 78% fluent in Dutch, 80% in Italian. My average in calculus is only 95%- but I'm hoping the next test will bump that up a bit."

"Uh-huh," says Jody, and never brings up school again.

Claudia wasn't joking. She came bounding to Dean with a huge grin when she got her first mark for calculus back. He gets updates from her every few days now, and finds some way to bring it up without bringing it up when she forgets.

Dean's never been the hugest geek, but he learns a lot around Claudia. She's always explaining something to him, and he finds himself listening even when he's not.

She's really into feminism- ("Equality is my JAM,") which Dean groans at the first time she says it, until she asks him if he thinks women should have equal rights and opportunities as men, and he says _duh_ , because he's not a caveman.

(Although cavemen women- cavewomen?- were super buff and awesome, apparently. The things you learn when your kid is a geek.)

(Your friend. Your friend, not your kid. Fuck.)

Claudia cheerfully tells him that means he's a feminist, and then goes on to talk about Night witches and how beer was invented by women.

 

 

About a month later, Dean fucks up.

Stuff happens between him and Sam, and Crowley's involved, and long story short Dean goes darkside and does a whole lot of crap, the result of which is that Claudia's held in a cell in total darkness for three weeks.

When she gets out, she can't stop shivering.  Her knuckles are bloody, and so is the wall.

She doesn't know it's Dean's fault, and the huge smile on her face when he slinks back to the bunker hurts.

He ends up telling her, and she listens in silence, her face grim.

Once he's finished she asks if they can still be besties.

He doesn't understand.

"Dude, come on," she scoffs. "You're my favorite human being. You think I'm going to let Crowley ruin that?"

He says yes, they're still besties. She hugs him. He's very proud, afterwards, of the fact that his voice didn't even crack a little bit.

She meets Claire, and they don't hit it off at first. Claire treats Claudia like a baby, and Claudia doesn't even bother trying to convince her otherwise. She just shrugs and does her own thing, which of course inevitably impresses Claire.

Claudia's super into science and math. She goes into a cleaning supply store and buys some weird chemicals, then mixes them up in the bunker. She adds a ton of paint.

It doesn't work well. It refuses to dry and Claudia groans and starts again.

Dean asks what she's doing.

"I'm trying to make a paint with a high content of barium chloride and sodium nitrate," she explains. "Maybe a double displacement reaction will happen. Then we'll have paint with barium nitrate and sodium chloride, also known as NaCl, also known as salt. Dean, imagine if we painted Devil's traps out of this stuff. Imagine if we started selling it. Imagine if all the homes in America were painted with salt."

Another one of Claudia's ideas is one that Dean is in love with and also nervous about.

"I call it the Dashner hypothesis," she explains, "because my dad deserves to have something named after him, too, even if he did- anyways. The Dashner hypothesis."

She's typed it up, and she reads it to him. It's midnight, and Dean's leaning on the hood of the Impala, staring at the stars. It's been a bad night full of Purgatory and Hell and Sam's bleeding corpse and Clau-

It's just been a bad night.

Claudia's followed him out after a while, and she's sitting cross-legged on the hood with a piece of paper.

"They say that magic is just science we don't understand yet. What if it were the other way around? what if science is just magic we do understand and we've got it all wrong? The base theories of science are simple: protons repel each other. But why? If we don't know, maybe it's magic and all the rest; all the elements and the mixtures; are just ingredients and instructions for spells."

Claudia keeps going, stuff about God being a scientist, and Dean only half-listens. He's thinking about everyone he's lost. Everyone Sam's lost.

Is it science or magic?

Or does it matter? He clearly sucks at both.

Claudia hugs him. He hugs her back, holding her, and she breaks away. "Dude, no. Stop hugging me. *I'm* hugging *you.* Just let yourself be hugged for once, jeez."

Dean laughs at her, because what's the difference?

(It turns out there's a huge difference. Dean is glad Claudia's sitting on the hood, because if she was standing she'd probably collapse when he went boneless against her. God, it's been so long since he was the one being hugged.)

(Sam tries sometimes but he's always too tired to insist when Dean becomes the one giving the hug instead of the one giving it. Besides, at this point it just feels natural.)

They smile at each other, and life goes on.

(Dean overhears a conversation between Sam and Jody. They're talking about Claudia. Jody says something about Claudia being the best thing to happen to Dean in a long time.) He jokes about it to Claudia later.

She gets thoughtful, and says no, we're the best things to happen to _each other_.

Dean looks at her. Her hair is cut neatly, by an actual barber; it's shoulder-length, not choppily pixie-cut short. She's a healthy weight, and her eyes are bright. She grins at him. She's wearing a hoodie and shorts, and she's draped sideways across an armchair in the bunker, reading one of Sam's Game of Thrones books.

It's the first time in what feels like forever that Dean's left someone better off than they were when he met them. He almost chokes up.

Claudia comes on hunts most of the time; she stays behind sometimes. Sometimes she goes for walks in the woods around the bunker, and Dean _definitely_  doesn't keep his phone closer to him and charged up all the way when she's out. He also doesn't turn off the screen-off timer so he can check the time every five minutes without looking like it.

Claudia comes back every time.

Life is good.  
  
Then everything goes wrong.

It was a standard salt and burn until it wasn't- and there was no way Dean was going to get to Claudia in time- and _oh no oh no not again_ \- and Dean was _this close_  to losing everythingeverythingeverything-

-and then tendrils of flame erupted around the ghost, and Dean was pulled back from the edge of nothingness so quickly he almost got whiplash. Claudia whirled around, wide-eyed, and then met Dean's eyes. Silently, they asked each other a question neither could answer. Sam dashed around the corner, panting, holding a gasoline can.

Claudia sighed in relief and fell onto her back, grinning. "Great timing, Sammy," Dean panted, and they wrapped up.

Looking back, it seemed so obvious. The whole thing was too complex. It had no trigger. It had to have been orchestrated.

But they ignored everything.

They ignored the comments about someone black being seen near the scene by a five-year-old.

It never occurred to them the kid might have meant black _eyes_.

They ignored the pale yellow powder in the corners of the house the ghosts had been haunting.

They found a twenty-four-hour diner, and they ordered food. At some point Cas showed up, and Claudia threw pistachios at him until he agreed to sit down with them. Everyone was talking and laughing- Dean watched a customer walk in, and wondered idly about their heavy winter jacket. It wasn't really that cold.

Then a head turned his way-

black eyes-

Claudia saw-

Claudia stood-

Dean stood-

Claudia was in the way-

The demon had a gun-

People screamed-

One shot-

Claudia fell-

Cas and Sam practically _vaulted_ over their table-

Someone was screaming in his ears, stop it-

Oh, it was him-

Claudia wasn't moving-

why-

why wasnt she-

no, she couldn't have-

she couldn't be-

she had to-

say something-

don't just-  
                 just-  
  
                         just-  
                                  just.  
  
                                           Emptiness.

                                                             Dean didn't remember much after that. He remembered Sam and Cas crouching beside him. He remembered croaking at Cas to bring her back bring her back-

                                        He remembered Cas gingerly touching the bullet wound

                                                                                                                                Dean kissed the top of Claudia's head.

                                                                                                                                                                                            Nothing happened.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Nothing.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Nothing.  
  
  
Dean didn't know how to deal with

                                                        Nothing.

  
 

 

 

                                                                                            Dean didn't hear Cas's explanation.

  
                           Or Sam's soft voice.

 

                                                                                                                      He didn't hear Jody, who showed up when they were burning her.

 

                              Or Claire.

 

             It was like he was underwater.

 

 

                                                                    What would Claudia say?

 

  
_Death is my JAM._

 

                                 He almost laughs.

  
                                                                                                              He almost cries.

  
He's not sure he really knows the difference.

 

  
He's on the diner floor, pressing his forehead to Claude's.

 

                                                                                                                                          He imagines Claudia wrapping her ankles around her chair and shuffling towards him.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                             He imagines telling her she's his favorite human too.

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      He imagines doing it right.

 

 

But Claudia knew.

But Claudia's gone.

  
What does Dean do now?

He goes through the motions.

  
He's in a state of shock.

 

  
Crowley shows up a week later.

 

 

 

Dean almost kills him.

 

 

Crowley tells him the demon was a rogue.

 

 

 

(There's something angry in his tone. Almost like he's upset too.)

the girl  
the girl  
the girl  
is gone  
  
  
Eventually, Dean goes on a case.

It doesn't go well, but he gets through it.

This time it really _is_  just a simple salt and burn.

Sam and Dean go back to the graveyard and burn the body. The grave is full of smoke and fire, slowly ebbing out.

It reminds Dean of Claudia.

_"I had to burn her," she explained. "I don't expect you to understand. But if you arrest me, don't expect me to stay locked up for long."_

_"We're not going to arrest you," said Sam, because Dean's words were floating somewhere above his head, and his arms were too heavy for him to reach up and pull them down._

  
_That seemed to be enough for the girl, and she smiled. "You're hunters, aren't you?"_

 _The girl was fourteen, and she had a name. Claudia Shahzadeh. "Well, no," she corrected herself. "Not really. On paper, I'm Claudia Dashner. My dad was white. But he-," her expression darkened. "Anyways, it's Shahzadeh."_  


Dean thinks back to a long car ride he and Claudia took together.

She started talking about her dad.

She kept talking, and Dean's fingers tightened around the steering wheel. His head whirled with anger.

She grew quiet.

"You know," she'd said in this tiny voice.

"If I could have picked a dad, I think I'd have picked you."

_And if I could have picked a daughter, said Dean_

But he didn't.

Dean doesn't realize he's crying until Sam is wrapping him in his arms. It wakes Dean up a little.

Sam loved Claudia too.

They need to be there for each other. He has to be there for Sammy. He has to be there for Sammy. Has to be there for Sammy. To be there for Sammy. Be there for Sammy. There for Sammy. For Sammy. Sammy. Sammy. Sammy. Sammy.

Claudia.

He can almost hear her.  _"Dude, no. Stop hugging me._ I'm _hugging_ you _. Just let yourself be hugged for once, jeez."_

Dean collapses.

He almost falls into the grave, with its whirling tendrils of smoke.

And you know what?

Sam catches him.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> horrible ending i know but eh
> 
> Someone please tell me how betas work I think I need one
> 
> I'm on Tumblr. https://fandomsallweekfolks.tumblr.com/


End file.
